The Engineer Who Tried to Put Age Verification Into Linux

https://lemmy.ml/post/44810447

The Engineer Who Tried to Put Age Verification Into Linux - Lemmy

Lemmy

2000s: war on general purpose computing because of copyright

2020s: war on general purpose computing because of child protection

In the 2000s the forces of freedom mostly won, e.g. en.wikipedia.org/…/Consumer_Broadband_and_Digital… didn’t become law. So far it seems that we are currently losing. :(

Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act - Wikipedia

In Europe too, chatcontrol keeps being pushed no matter how often it’s being struck down.

Yes; recent news have made me somewhat optimistic that the resistance to it is winning though.

Age verification laws currently look like a much greater danger to freedom.

Personally I think that win (while really a win) is being overcelebrated.

It’s easily reverted. All they’ll have to do is find some csam or terrorism related scandal in the news and pump it as a big deal, and all the resistance will be gone at the next vote.

With chat control we actually have to distinguish two different things that people sometimes confuse:

  • voluntary chat control (“chat control 1.0”), which is currently already the law in the EU
  • mandatory chat control (“chat control 2.0”), proposed in 2022

Voluntary chat control is about letting operators of communication services voluntarily scan messages for certain illegal activity (without this constituting a violation of data protection laws). This doesn’t break encryption and isn’t a part of a war on general purpose computing. While there are many good arguments against it, it’s not especially catastrophic. It’s a detail of business regulation.

Mandatory chat control is about forcing them to do so, which must necessarily break encryption and impose limits on software freedom. This is what is most important to oppose.

The most recent win ended up rejecting even (most) voluntary chat control, which is a good sign that mandatory chat control won’t get a majority either.

Fucking fascists arent ever going to stop. They want to control everything, they want the people to be their slaves.
It gets worse every day.